You Don't Have To Stay
Why You Should Never Hesitate to Share Your Art
There are very specific years in my life I would never choose to revisit. 1993. 1997. 2015. And, 2002. My sophomore year in college.
In fact, that year was fraught with so much trauma that I rarely speak of it even now. It is one of the few seasons of my life I do not allow public access. But there was also a beautiful, simple but defining moment I’ll never forget that happened amidst the disaster. It was so pivotal that it has come back to me at almost every crossroads I’ve had as an adult.
It serves as an endless reminder why I believe so strongly in the power of words- in showing up here, continually and on various platforms over the years just to share my own words with you.
I attended a private Christian college in New York that I had no business attending. The tuition was a death knell. I worked 4 jobs steadily just to offset the burden. It caused an enormous amount of strain on my parents, my academics, my health, and my relationships. I didn’t feel like I could go home- and it felt like my dorm walls were crushing me from the inside. Mainly, at that time, due to the toxic Ferris wheel of a relationship I had with my at-the-time boyfriend (and the brewing liver infection that went undetected for months).
He was a big personality. Silly and loud, publicly affectionate, extraverted. (Perhaps these beautiful and completely opposite character traits from mine should have tipped me off that we were doomed?) But, he also had sides of him that were eating me alive. Jealousy, insecurity, control. Anne Lamott says that we own everything that has happened to us, and if people wanted us to write kindly about them they should have treated us better. In truth, I have always deeply struggled with that. This is my side of a very tangled, very old story. There are things I will protect for the families that now exist, that didn’t, then. I am not sure if this is the right choice or the cowardly one- but it’s my choice, for now.
Our on again-off again relationship spin cycle was depleting. His controlling behavior, which was masked as concern and protection, started to push and pull. We fought more than we talked. I began chewing my nails until they bled. I stopped sleeping at night. Then, stopped going to class.
On this particular Christian college campuses, dorms were separated by two genders- male and female. There were weekly visitations where girls was permitted to enter the male gender’s space. It was customary for me to visit my boyfriend during these visits, and leave hours later, crying.
One week after another tear-inducing visit, I tried to discretely jump on the elevator in his hallway that would carry me down to the first floor and blissfully, back to my own room, when a hand grabbed the closing elevator door.
He wasn’t a friend of mine. We had one class together. He knew my roommate from back home. I had seen him in my boyfriend’s hallway a few times. I’m not sure we had ever said more than a few words in passing to each other, and it was January, so there were plenty of opportunities. He didn’t look me in the eye. In fact, he just stared straight ahead. I watched as the floors rushed by like speeding cars. Just when I convinced myself that not everything is about me, and he was probably on his way to pick up a late night snack or play video games with a friend on a different floor, he turned to me and said something I’ve repeated to myself in every single rock-bottom moment of my life.
“You don’t have to stay.”
I wiped at my leaking mascara down the right side of my face.
“We’ve all watched you. Every week. You don’t have to stay with him. You never have to stay.”
He got off at the next floor leaving my dripping jaw on the ground of that dirty elevator floor.
YOU NEVER HAVE TO STAY.
Women in high controlled religions and their affiliations are conditioned to be subservient, demure, and steadfast. We hold the line. Clean up the mess. Hide the brokeness. Push through the pain. We curate the image of our partners, so when they’re held up to the light, no one can guess what lurks just behind the ribs.
I was a child of a messy divorce and watched how that disunion broke apart pieces that were never made whole again. It made me double down on “getting it right”. On “being good”.
Not only had no one EVER suggested to me that I could and had the right to choose, but it NEVER occurred to me to leave.
Not once.
Until that night when a boy I can’t remember the last name of gave me the kind of permission that has saved me over and over again, ever since.
There are plenty of circumstances in my life that were brutal and breaking- and I have chosen to stay.
There have also been moments in which I chose not to.
It has been those moments that have given me back to myself.
All because of one moment in time, one elevator, and one sentence from a stranger.
So with borrowed words, spoken into the very marrow of your bones- know this.
If you are stuck- if you are hurting- if you aren’t free-
If you can’t grow where you are-
If your potential feels like the woodpecker right outside of the window, banging on the glass-
You don’t have to stay.
You’ve never had to.
And now that you know- you owe it others to tell them, too. Perhaps not the same thing. No, not everyone needs the same thing. But there is a someone, somewhere, who needs the exact words you’ve kept squirreled away in the journal in your desk drawer. The painting you’ve deemed “not good enough” to sell. The song you’ve “never finished”. The sweater you stopped knitting. The memoir you stopped writing because you’re “ a nobody,” and who would want to know about the minutia of an unknown?
Perhaps there is a young girl, crying in an elevator, just waiting for someone to remind her of her own power.
Maybe it could be you.
Anne Lamott says that we own everything that has happened to us, and if people wanted us to write kindly about them they should have treated us better. 💕